Icebreaker: Chapters 20–26

Some raced to get hammocks and sealskins and anything else that might be used to douse the fire.

GET THIS WATER OUT OF THE SHIP BEFORE WE FOUNDER.

She marched off, and after a moment’s hesitation, Fin followed, blundering along in the darkness until he caught up with her.

The sound of the Oyster’s engines was as vital to her as her own heartbeat, and without it she felt bereft, as if she had lost her mam and da all over again.

No one had time or energy to listen to a Nothing girl, especially when she was talking about something as farfetched, something as ridiculous as a strange ship.

Crab inclined his head. “Perhaps you are right. The boy could not have done it without—”

She dug in her heels, and was dragged along the passage, her feet catching on the rivets.

“I expect,” said First Officer Crab from somewhere up ahead, “that Albie will have the lectrics fixed within the hour, once the stranger is gone. Once this untidiness is rectified.”

High in the rigging, the wind fiddles played a mournful dirge.

We're takin’ you elsewhere as soon as reinforcements arrive.

Down its length swarmed countless numbers of black rats, leaping and jumping over one another, running across each other's backs and dropping onto the ice in a squeaking, writhing mass.

The sled dropped onto the ice, its whalebone struts rattling, and Dolph pounced on the rugs that were strapped to it.

“I’d rather die by Mam’s ship.”
It was clearly bravado.

Petrel glanced at him, and her laugh faltered.

She tried to remember what he had said, but the ominous sounds beneath her had driven everything else out of her mind.

And out of the midst of the roaring came teeth, each one bigger than a full-grown man, and jaws that opened...and opened...as the sled and its hapless passengers hurtled forward.

She had to feel her way past hundreds of rats, all of them sprawled on their stomachs in attitudes of exhaustion.

“Then we'd be back on the ice," hissed Dolph, “or twenty fathoms under water, and too dead to make stupid comments. It can’t have swallowed us after all.”

But at the same time she felt a sense of inevitability.
“Always knew the Maw’d get me,” she whispered.

She was standing on a porous deck, with black rats flopped on every side of her.

The black rats woke from their exhausted sleep with a great squeaking and protesting, and the shadows from the lantern cavorted like ice devils.

Petrel shifted from foot to foot, thinking about the men they had seen raging across the ice. The dreadful fervor of them. The hatred in their cries and the axes in their hands.

To her relief, there was a final rasp and the hatch creaked open...and there on the other side of it, her eyes reflecting the lantern light, was Missus Slink, pedaling lopsidedly at a tiny treadmill, which was geared to cogs and wheels and levers, all of them sliding over each other to unseal the hatch.

“Come on, come on,” said Mister Smoke, clambering up onto a narrow metal walkway.

The weight of three centuries had bound it in place, so that Petrel felt as if she were trying to lift the entire history of the Oyster, with its countless births and deaths, its icy winters and bountiful summers, its wars and fishing seasons and hunger and hopes and expectations.

“Don’t forget the screwdriver, Slink,” said Mister Smoke, who was balanced precariously on the edge of the box.

“I do want to save the ship,” said Petrel. “But I—”
Missus Slink’s voice overrode her. “You want to save Squid and Krill? And Albie?”

It echoed off the walls of the little cabin and boomed up and down, forcing its way into every corner of the ship, drowning out the creak of the ice and the pipe messages and the turbulent beating of Fin’s heart.

The sounds of the ship and the grating of the ice against its hull wound together in a plaintive lament.

He had always accepted the notion without questioning. He had accepted everything Brother Thrawn had told him.

Petrel’s face was still pale with shock from Fin’s revelation.

The Commons ladderway seemed to go on forever, as if Brother Thrawn's malice had slithered down into the ship and changed its structure.

Crab should've been on the bridge, thought Petrel, running along the last passage. He should've seen the grappling hooks come over the rail. He should've stopped the cruel men before they got a foothold.

He should've stopped the cruel men before they got a foothold.
But it was too late for recriminations.

The boy captain took a step forward and stood, looking down at the carnage.

There was something horribly hypnotic about that flat, cold voice. Petrel found herself nodding, as if Brother Thrawn were talking to her.

She was about to turn away when a single voice said, “Petrel.”
It wasn’t the cry of acclamation that the others had been.

But when he began to question them about who had died in the fighting, and about the fire and what they had done so far to mend the damage, their shyness vanished, and before long they were asking his advice on myriad things, foremost of which was fixing the lectrics as quickly as possible so they would not all freeze to death.

But when he began to question them about who had died in the fighting, and about the fire and what they had done so far to mend the damage, their shyness vanished, and before long they were asking his advice on myriad things, foremost of which was fixing the lectrics as quickly as possible so they would not all freeze to death.

Sadly, she hugged the placid bodies inside her jacket. With the excitement over, she was feeling slightly sick. She wanted to be somewhere quiet, to mourn for the rats who had been her only friends for so long.